IT BROKE his heart, he said. “I can tell you now,” the former fugitive and current Sen. Panfilo “Ping” Lacson told reporters a couple of days after he resurfaced. “I cried my eyes out, not for me, but for my staff. Why did they have to be dragged into this?” The question is plaintive, but [...]
THE BAD news for the President is that his performance rating has dipped from +64 last November to +51 this March, a pretty substantial drop of 13 percent. Much of it had to do with his buying a Porsche. Almost half of SWS’s respondents agreed with the proposition: “President Aquino’s purchase of an expensive car [...]
MANY REASONABLE people do not understand why the resources of the entire Filipino nation have been mobilized to persuade China to spare the lives of the three Filipinos who were executed on Wednesday for the heinous crime of drug trafficking. They ask: Why are we spending precious diplomatic capital to plead for the lives of [...]
HIS EYES moist with tears of joy, Red party Akbayan Rep. Teodoro Casiño said that the House of Representative’s 212 yes votes on March 22 to impeach Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez represented “overwhelming public sentiment” against her. Casiño though was mum whether the resolution, two days later, of 204 of his colleagues to bury Akbayan’s arch [...]
NEW DELHI—The troubles of the Fukushima nuclear power plant in northeast Japan have dealt a severe blow to the global nuclear industry, a powerful cartel of less than a dozen major state-owned or state-guided firms that have been trumpeting a nuclear-power renaissance. But the risks that seaside reactors like Fukushima face from natural disasters are [...]
GENERAL PROFILE: 23 years old, male, single, smart, talented, responsible and perhaps stupid in many ways. Health: Excellent. Personality quotient: Tolerable, slightly aggressive. I.Q.: Slightly above average. Waistline: Slightly above average. These are the stuff you normally reveal in the process of job hunting, ultimately leading to the inevitable question in the interview: “How do [...]
MY TENSES are getting mixed up. Present or past? Are the convicts still waiting to die, are they dying, or are they already dead? By now we should already know the fate of the three overseas Filipinos workers (OFWs) who had been condemned and scheduled to die by lethal injection in China on Wednesday. Dying [...]
THIS REFERS to the letter of Rafael dela Torre. (Inquirer, 3/5/11) He defends the so-called Performance Based Regulation (PBR) as “our insurance against going back to the ‘days of darkness’.” May I invite the attention of Dela Torre, who has “vowed to fight for” the interests of residential power users, to the following facts: 1) [...]
THE HUNDREDS of thousands of barangay tanods, tricycle drivers and street sweepers all over the Philippines are being exploited by politicians as walking advertisements. Uniforms bearing a politico’s name, coupled with his/her personal political slogans, are used to commit this crime in violation of the human rights of these clueless citizens. Adding insult to injury [...]
BATCH 2011 does not only have to confront a shrinking job market and a ballooning unemployment problem. Its members must also contend with state licensure exams whose results may belie that college graduates have had any solid education at all, which could further dim their job prospects. Data compiled by the Commission on Higher Education [...]
WELL, IT was just a reprieve. Nobody said it was going to be permanent. And so the executions of the Filipino drug mules will take place today anyway. Your heart bleeds for the kin of the condemned, especially the mothers. That was a heart-tugging picture the other day of Basilisa Ordinario holding up a placard [...]
IT SEEMS that, in the wake of a new controversy on his show “Willing Willie,” TV host Willie Revillame has shown he has learned some lessons. Monday evening, it seems he guested Jan-Jan, the six year-old boy whose plight drew a firestorm of criticism and protest when a clip of his segment on the show [...]
